helping her out like reselling products she needed in exchange for her Bitcoins
I would not call that living solely on bitcoins, nearly none of the merchants accept bitcoins there.
If she gets a crypto backed card with visa membership it would be a lot easier to live a normal life.
In normal circumstances she might not have survived. But her friends helped her out with the necessities. Still I agree with your post. It will be much easier if she gets a Visa or Mastercard debit card, which can be topped up with Bitcoins. I myself owns one.
but the main message of stories like these is to show usage of bitcoin not fiat. note that it is not saying she survived with a thousands bucks. it is saying she survived with some amount of bitcoin. using a Visa, debit, ... are using fiat not bitcoin even if you top them off with bitcoin you are still doing an exchange of bitcoin to fiat then you use the fiat which raises the question of why bother with bitcoin in first place and pay an additional fee instead of sticking to fiat!